Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14,
1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich and he began his schooling
there at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued
his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal
Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and
mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss
citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a
position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained
his doctor's degree.

The arguments centre on a 2005 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), which examined signalling pathways in the development of skin cancer (Rangaswami, H., Bulbule, A. & Kundu, G. C. J. Biol. Chem. 280, 19381–19392; 2005). It was authored by Gopal Kundu — 2004 winner of the India's highest honour in science, the Bhatnagar prize — and two colleagues at the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS) in Pune.
The journal retracted the paper in February 2007 after an investigation prompted by an anonymous email. The authors were told that the paper contained "data that was reproduced without citation and with different labelling" from a paper the same group had published in 2004 (Rangaswami, H., Bulbule, A. & Kundu, G. C. J. Biol. Chem. 279, 38921–38935; 2004). Journal editors claimed the errors amounted to "deliberate misrepresentation".

Monday, June 04, 2007

The UNIXHATERS Handbook
[download]
is a fun to read book.
It introduces us to the frustrations of the 80's hackers who were
exposed to UNIX of that time [it is presented as
virus-with-a-user-interface in the book]. They were not quarantined in
time so it simply spread...

Most of the stuff in the book is not valid literally [Now we have
GNU/Linux and I must note that many of the bugs mentioned here have
been fixed, so you can not replicate them. But the
points of 'being-productive' is still context free :)] but some of the
philosophy mentioned, still holds.

But listen to what Dennis Ritchie [Co-creator UNIX and C] has to say
about the book:

Here is my metaphor:
your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many
well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets
of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it
reeks too much of contempt and of envy.

The original Unix solved a problem and solved it well, as did the Roman
numeral system, the mercury treatment for syphilis, and carbon paper.
And like those technologies, Unix, too, rightfully belongs to history.

"Two of the
most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that
this is a coincidence."

—Anonymous

Unix was evolutionarily superior to its competitors, but not
technically superior. Unix became a commercial success because it was a
virus.

A century ago, fast typists were jamming their keyboards, so engineers
designed the QWERTY keyboard to slow them down.

550
chiarell… User unknown: Not a typewriter
-sendmail
error message

Sturgeon's Law, which states that 90% percent of any field is crap.

wc
*.c
[A UNIX program 'wc'
used here over C source files from the book: The Unix Programming
Environment]
Yep. That's what much of this programmer's work consists of. In fact,
today I spent so much time counting my C files that I didn't really
have time to do anything else. I think I'll go count them again.

Yet somehow Unix maintains its reputation as a programmer's dream.
Maybe it lets programmers dream about being productive, rather than
letting them actually be productive.

If you drop a frog into briskly boiling water it will immediately jump
out. Boiling water is hot, you know. However, if you put a frog into
cold water and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog won't notice and
will be boiled to death.

The noted linguistic theorist Benjamin Whorf said that our language determines what
concepts we can think. C has this effect on Unix; it
prevents programmers from writing robust software by making such a
thing unthinkable.

bugs usually don't get fixed (or even tracked down), and periodically
rebooting Unix is the most reliable way to keep it from exhibiting
Alzheimer's disease.

Unix discovers this after spending a few hours to dump 2 gigabytes.
Unix happily reports the bad spot, asks you to replace the tape with a
new one, destroy the evil tape, and start over. Yep, Unix considers an
entire tape unusable if it can't write on one inch of it.

Using crypt is like giving a person two aspirin for a heart attack.
Crypt's encryption algorithm is incredibly weak—so weak that
several years ago, a graduate student at the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory wrote a program that automatically decrypts
data files encrypted with crypt.2

always going on about how under real operating systems (ITS and MULTICS
among others), one never had to worry about losing mail, losing files,
needing to run fsck on every reboot… the minor
inconveniences Unix weenies suffer

The Unix file system slows down as the disk fills up. Push disk usage
much past 90%, and you'll grind your computer to a halt. The Unix
solution takes a page from any good politician and fakes the numbers.
Unix's df command is rigged so that a disk that is 90% filled gets
reported as "100%," 80% gets reported as being "91%" full, and so forth.
Weird, huh? It's sort of like someone who sets his watch five minutes
ahead and then arrives five minutes late to all of his appointments,
because he knows that his watch is running fast.

So why do people believe that the Unix file system is high performance?
Because Berkeley named their file system "The Fast File System."

By design, NFS is connectionless and stateless. There's only one
problem with a connectionless, stateless system: it doesn't work.

God has a binary
representation is just another clear indication that Unix is extremely
cabalistic and was probably written by disciples of Aleister Crowley.

Unix teaches us about
the transitory nature of all things, thus ridding us of samsaric
attachments and hastening enlightenment. - Michael Travers
<mt@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
[Now, I no longer have attachments to my processes. Both processes and
the disappearance of processes are illusory. The world is Unix, Unix is
the world, laboring ceaselessly for the salvation of all sentient
beings.]

In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH Institute and father
of the Pascal, Modula 2, and Oberon structured languages, merely stated
that P. T. Barnum was
correct.

Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called
"A." When we found
others were actually trying to create real 308 Creators Admit C, Unix
Were Hoax programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features
and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean
compile on the following syntax: